Bottas backs Hamilton to find his Ferrari rhythm: “He still deserves great results”
Valtteri Bottas has thrown a supportive arm around his old teammate’s shoulders, saying he hopes Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari project clicks after a bruising start to life in red.
“I hope he will bounce back. But time will show if he will,” Bottas told Crash.net. “He’s had some good moments, a bit of bad luck as well. It’s tricky. It’s not easy changing a team after such a long time at Mercedes, being kind of the lead man. It’s a very different environment that he’s working with now… But I really hope so because I think he deserves still great results in this sport.”
Hamilton’s opening Ferrari campaign has been a study in contrasts: flashes of the old inevitability — most notably a lights-to-flag victory in the Chinese Sprint — blended with awkward weekends and a mid-season slump that left even the seven-time champion publicly irritated with himself. At one point, he quipped that Ferrari “should change drivers” such was his frustration.
The summer break reset brought a more measured Hamilton back into the paddock. Yes, there was the crash at Zandvoort to compound the low points, but the tone has shifted. After salvaging P8 in Singapore, he addressed the tifosi and the team directly with something closer to a mission statement than a platitude.
“I’m really proud of this team and want to help deliver the results they and the tifosi deserve,” Hamilton wrote on social media. “I see the progress we are making, and the hard work that goes into every race, but this is Ferrari. Progress alone is not enough. To achieve greatness we need to go further, be better. There is so much we can achieve together, and if we can build on our successes, and change the things we need to, I fully believe we will get there.”
The challenge is obvious and, for Hamilton, new. After more than a decade with Mercedes, the entire ecosystem has changed — car characteristics, power unit traits, the rhythm of Maranello, even the way feedback loops through the garage. Drivers talk about “language” with a car; Hamilton is still learning the dialect.
Whether that yields a grand prix win before season’s end, or even a first Ferrari podium for the 40-year-old, is the open question hanging over the autumn flyaway run. Ferrari and Hamilton won’t say it out loud, but you sense the longer bet is on 2026, when wholesale regulation changes rip up the form book. Hamilton’s made a career of landing in the right place as the ground shifts. A reset might be exactly what he’s banking on.
There’s also the matter of Hamilton’s bigger picture. An eighth title remains the north star, and he’s been explicit about refusing to become another champion who leaves Maranello without adding to their legend.
“If you look at the team over the last 20 years, they’ve had amazing drivers,” Hamilton said earlier this year. “You’ve had Kimi, you’ve had Fernando, you’ve had Sebastian – all world champions. However, they didn’t win a world championship. For me, I refuse for that to be the case with me. So, I’m going the extra mile… Whilst things are for sure going to be different, because there’s a different culture and everything, I think sometimes if you take the same path all the time, you get the same result.”
Bottas knows better than most the dynamics at play. He and Hamilton were Mercedes teammates through five title-winning seasons for the team, including the bitter 2021 finale that denied Hamilton a record-breaking eighth crown by eight points. The Finn’s take is pragmatic: moving from the team that became your competitive home into Ferrari’s rarified air is not plug-and-play.
“Time will show,” Bottas repeated. It usually does.
For now, Hamilton’s Ferrari arc sits somewhere between slog and slow-burn. The sprint win in Shanghai showed the pace is there in bursts. The missteps and the self-critique prove he knows the standard he’s chasing. And the message to the tifosi suggests the fire’s intact.
That’s the thing about Hamilton: strip away the noise from a difficult first year in red and you’re left with a driver who has built a career on adapting faster than anyone else. Maranello won’t make it easy. It never does. But Bottas’ instinct feels right. If Hamilton gets the Ferrari language down, he’ll make himself understood soon enough.
